What Doesn't Seem Like Work?
Paul Graham uses his father's childhood passion for solving math problems to propose a heuristic for choosing work: if something seems like work to others but not to you, that's a strong sign you're suited for it. He gives examples like enjoying debugging (common among programmers) and writing papers for friends in college. The essay encourages readers to explicitly ask themselves what feels effortless to them but laborious to others.
My father is a mathematician. For most of my childhood he worked for Westinghouse, modelling nuclear reactors.
He was one of those lucky people who know early on what they want to do. When you talk to him about his childhood, there's a clear watershed at about age 12, when he "got interested in maths."
He grew up in the small Welsh seacoast town of Pwllheli. As we retraced his walk to school on Google Street View, he said that it had been nice growing up in the country.
"Didn't it get boring when you got to be about 15?" I asked.
"No," he said, "by then I was interested in maths."
In another conversation he told me that what he really liked was solving problems. To me the exercises at the end of each chapter in a math textbook represent work, or at best a way to reinforce what you learned in that chapter. To him the problems were the reward. The text of each chapter was just some advice about solving them. He said that as soon as he got a new textbook he'd immediately work out all the problems — to the slight annoyance of his teacher, since the class was supposed to work through the book gradually.
我的父亲是一位数学家。我童年的大部分时光，他都在西屋公司工作，从事核反应堆建模。
他是那种很早就知道自己想做什么的幸运儿。和他聊起童年，会发现在大约12岁时有一个清晰的分水岭——那时他“对数学产生了兴趣”。
他生长在威尔士沿海小镇普尔赫利。当我们在谷歌街景上重走他上学的路时，他说在乡下长大挺好的。
“到了15岁左右不会觉得无聊吗？”我问。
“不会，”他说，“那时我已经对数学感兴趣了。”
另一次谈话中，他告诉我他真正喜欢的是解题。对我来说，数学课本每章末尾的习题代表着“工作”，或者最多是巩固本章所学内容的一种方式。但对他而言，习题就是奖赏，每章的正文不过是一些解题建议。他说一拿到新课本，他就会立刻解出所有题目——这让他老师有点恼火，因为全班应该循序渐进地学完这本书。
Few people know so early or so certainly what they want to work on. But talking to my father reminded me of a heuristic the rest of us can use. If something that seems like work to other people doesn't seem like work to you, that's something you're well suited for. For example, a lot of programmers I know, including me, actually like debugging. It's not something people tend to volunteer; one likes it the way one likes popping zits. But you may have to like debugging to like programming, considering the degree to which programming consists of it.
很少有人能这么早、这么确定自己想做什么。但与父亲的谈话让我想起了一个我们其他人可以使用的启发式方法：如果某件事对别人来说像是工作，而对你来说却不像是工作，那么这件事就是你所擅长的。例如，我认识的很多程序员（包括我自己）其实喜欢调试。这不是人们通常会主动提及的事；喜欢它的感觉就像喜欢挤痘痘。但考虑到编程中有很大一部分是调试，你可能需要喜欢调试才能喜欢编程。
The stranger your tastes seem to other people, the stronger evidence they probably are of what you should do. When I was in college I used to write papers for my friends. It was quite interesting to write a paper for a class I wasn't taking. Plus they were always so relieved.
It seemed curious that the same task could be painful to one person and pleasant to another, but I didn't realize at the time what this imbalance implied, because I wasn't looking for it. I didn't realize how hard it can be to decide what you should work on, and that you sometimes have to figure it out from subtle clues, like a detective solving a case in a mystery novel.
你的品味在别人看来越奇怪，它们就越可能是你应该做什么的有力证据。我在大学时经常帮朋友写论文。为一个我没选的课写论文相当有趣，而且他们总是如释重负。
同一件事对一个人是痛苦，对另一个人却是愉快，这似乎很奇怪，但当时我没有意识到这种不平衡意味着什么，因为我并没有刻意去寻找。我没有意识到决定自己该做什么可能有多难，有时你必须像侦探破案一样，从细微的线索中找出答案。
So I bet it would help a lot of people to ask themselves about this explicitly. What seems like work to other people that doesn't seem like work to you?
Thanks to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and my father for reading drafts of this.
所以我相信，对自己明确提出这个问题会对很多人有帮助：对别人来说是工作的事，对你来说却不像是工作的事是什么？
感谢 Sam Altman、Trevor Blackwell、Jessica Livingston、Robert Morris 以及我的父亲阅读了本文的草稿。